Dungeon Tour Guide ch. 29

Name: Lucas

Class: [Dungeon Core] lv. 3

Spells (ordered by: used recently)

[Spawn Monster]: D

> [Spawn Snake]: D+

> [Spawn Construct]: F+

[Reshape]: C-

[Create Water]: D

[Create Fire]: D

[Replicate]: F

[Dungeon Perception]: B-

[New spell available!]

[View more spells?]

Stats

[Spawn Speed]: D+

[Capacity]: C-

[Mana]: C

[Endurance]: D+

I hadn’t checked the interface in a hot second, and I was a little surprised to see how much I’d improved. Sure, it was mostly minor stuff—a D- turned into a D here, a C into a B- there—but I’d made measurable changes and I’d hardly noticed.

Then again, so had the trio. While I hadn’t been watching, they’d been training diligently, and they’d used the lessons learned from their first two dungeon dives to become more effective in the field. On their first outing with me, they’d been no better prepared than any newbie adventurer, even if they had possessed great potential, but now they had realized the power within them and used it to the fullest extent.

If I could lead them to greatness, I could make myself great as well. While the gains I’d made weren’t quite as good as the ones that they had achieved, my dungeon half had improved a fair bit. More monsters, more variety, more rooms…

All I had to do was keep going, and I would one day become a truly legendary dungeon.

Well, that was a bit arrogant to assume, but making overly ambitious goals had always been a habit of mine. I would see how that turned out.

Step one was checking out that new spell I’d just received. There was something different in the back of my mind, a tickling presence that definitely hadn’t been there before. For a second, I wondered if it was a lingering mental effect, some aftereffect from the [Astral Monk]’s ring or maybe even something from the [Displacer] that I hadn’t accounted for, but the way the thought slid into my interface when I poked meant that it was definitely benign.

What had changed?

I had more mana than usual, that was one thing. I’d been slowly expanding my mana capacity over time, so that was to be expected, but right now I was above even my increased maximum. I definitely hadn’t done enough damage to the [Displacer] in the fight to get that much. Had the goddess somehow decided that the mana from its death was going to me because it had died here? That was one possibility, and it felt right, but there was something else.

Alright. That something else was probably related to the new spell. This notification for a new spell was different from the one I’d gotten on my last level-up—last time, it had appeared in a submenu of [Spawn Monster], but this time it was in the main one. Did that mean it was going to be a more widely applicable spell?

“Stop stalling and just take the damn spell,” I muttered to myself. I was nervous about it, but there was no reason to be. The goddess hadn’t done anything malicious to me yet, and she definitely wasn’t about to start with a level-up spell.

[New spell available!]

[Options: N/A — only one option available]

[New spell: [Assimilate]!]

[Assimilate]

Proficiency: F-

Effect: By absorbing a recently deceased non-human creature, you may add its species to [Spawn Monster]. Requires concentration for a set period of time. Once used, [Assimilate] cannot be used for a day.

Alternate Effect: Locked.

Oh, shit. That was strong.

Wait, this is stupidly strong. Things started clicking into place in the back of my mind, that weird extra mana sensation finally making sense as I viewed it through [Assimilate].

Yes, there were restrictions, and yes, it would probably start out pretty slow, but if I saw that right, that was the body and mana of the [Displacer], frozen in time and space to the eyes of [Assimilate].

I could populate this dungeon with a bevy of monsters each individually powerful enough to necessitate a full team of level 10s to take down. That… that was a little frightening, especially given the current level of the dungeon. To jump from snakes and slow-moving earth constructs to magical teleporting freaks of nature was an absolutely astronomical leap in power.

On top of that, the spell looked like it could evolve. There was an alternate effect that I couldn’t access yet, and with time, the spell might allow me to absorb still-alive creatures or have a decreased time to cast.

In short, it was fucking broken for a dungeon. It was also pretty in-line with the skills that I knew the harder dungeons out there possessed—some of the ones on the ARI like the Dungeon of Horrors had certainly seen cases of this—but it was still a scary amount of power to have stored within me.

Well. That was a good thing, really. I just had to manage it properly.

Alright. I had to think about this. Was it worth it to use [Assimilate] on the slowly dissipating corpse of the [Displacer]? The Will of the Goddess hadn’t totally removed the monster’s body from this world yet, so I did have the opportunity.

On the one hand, I would never use its species. [Displacer]s were entirely too strong for level 1 to 5 adventurers to even have a hope at fighting, even with my assistance, and I knew from Lisa that the difficulty rating of the dungeon was going to include those low-leveled adventurers.

On top of that, if it was ever known that my dungeon held [Displacer]s, there was a non-zero chance the Guild would call an emergency and throw half the adventurers in the kingdom at me. Not even my remaining [Divine Resurrections] would be enough for me to survive that.

On the other hand, even if I was never going to spawn it, it would be nice to have as a backup. Kingsguard activity was increasing—if I ever got raided by a batch of Kingsguard that were too strong for me to handle with rocks and snakes, I would quite appreciate a strong monster to throw at them. Also, if my difficulty range expanded enough, there was a possibility that I would encounter adventuring parties who could actually defeat it.

Having it as a backup plan didn’t sound too shabby. My one worry was that it would occupy a [Spawn Monster] slot that could be used for osmething that I’d actually regularly spawn into the dungeon, but there was no way I could verify that besides actually using the spell.

I spent a total of maybe five minutes weighing the positives and negatives of the situation before realizing that I wasn’t going to make a decision if I just kept thinking about it forever. I was pretty sure there were slightly more positives than negatives, so I decided to go for it.

The corpse was still there when I came back to it, albeit a little less tangible than it had been before. The Will of the Goddess tended to act slower on monsters this big, so I did still have some time before it faded away entirely.

[Assimilate], I called, and my dungeon-half followed through. It was fascinating to watch and do, I had to admit. The mana that flowed through me started literally pulling the creature’s body into the ground, separately dragging its core body and all the tentacles that had separated from it. I [Reshape]d the rock so that the [Displacer] parts could fit inside. It looked disturbingly like the ground was eating it, I had to admit.

With the initiation of the process came mental pressure. I’d been expecting it, given that the process apparently required concentration. It was a fair bit more taxing than the toll that a concentration healing spell—[Healing Stream], for instance—would’ve taken on me, but that was because [Divine Healer] applied to that and not my dungeon maneuvers. Still, it was pretty manageable.

Within a minute, the moving ground had completely erased every trace of the [Displacer]. Churning the surface layer of the rock had pretty much annihilated the grass and soil that the monster had brought in along with the marks of battle, and the [Displacer] itself was entombed in stone now.

The spell wasn’t done yet though, and I could sense that this was going to be the real tricky part.

The mental pressure from before increased, and I thought I felt a physical element join it as well, a weight pressing down on the base of my neck. I wasn’t sure whether that part was imagined or not, but it was a bit irritating. I wasn’t able to use a healing spell for it, either—concentration was a requirement to cast, not a symptom of casting, and so there was no spell I could use to alleviate its effects.

I grit my teeth. It could be worse.

Thankfully, the pressure didn’t really worsen.

Less thankfully, it took me nearly a full hour to finish the process. It was supremely, mind-numbingly boring, just sitting there and maintaining concentration on the spell, but it was that or waste all my efforts and I wasn’t about to do that.

[Successful [Assimilate] achieved!]

[New spells available!]

After far too long, it was done. I went to find an entertaining novel before I looked at my options more. I had gotten a touch sick of staring at the interface, and a book and a snack were just the right things for a quick break.

Three hours later, I looked up from the book and realized that the sun was starting to go down.

Whoops. That had always been an unfortunate tendency of mine, and coming to another world hadn’t really lessened my love for reading.

At least there wasn’t really anything left to do in the day. I considered testing out the [Displacer], but I didn’t actually have a way to kill my own monsters. If I let that thing loose in the dungeon proper, it’d be a pretty big issue. My best option to test it out was to build a separate room separated far from the main dungeon so that the monster couldn’t [Displace] itself into a tour, but my reach didn’t actually extend that far.

[Error: [Assimilate] is on cooldown! You may use it again in 20:57:43]

Yeah, that tracked.

Well, I’d be able to use it again tomorrow, and without a ‘deceased creature’ to use it on, I could instead utilize it to expand the bounds of my dungeon-half. I didn’t know how effective it would be, but I had nothing but time in here. With time, I’d have enough room to make an isolated safe room for testing.

Alright. I had a gameplan.

Hopefully nothing would go wrong before I could implement it.